I mentioned my memories to my sister, and she said that what she thought was wrong (in retrospect) was that when 8 she had to take her 4 year old brother to the pool with her.
Sadly, relentless bullying
I was fortunate to be friends with both the nerds and bullies through middle school, so was spared the wrath of the bullies. I’m ashamed to admit I participated in some of the bullying, sorry Walter. Though not as bad as some of my friends. They would have contests about how fast and how often they could make certain girls and guys cry.
I vaguely recall some of them being sent to the Principal’s office, and they’d let up for a while, but it always continued. Sometimes Walter would stand up for himself (he was a big kid, I think held back a year or two) and get into a fight. Sometimes winning, but more often losing because everyone (not me) would gang up on him.
Despite my sometimes picking on him, he always considered me his only friend, saying he loved me and calling me his wife. I’ve always been one of the smallest and it was like this Daffy Duck cartoon…“I will love him and pet him and squeeze hm…”. If Walter got me in a bear hug, I’d have to call on my friends or the teacher to have him let me go. Really sorry Walter!
After high school graduation (mid-70s), I got a job as a school bus driver. I imagine 18 year olds are not allowed to do this today, and probably can’t even get a commercial license.
Not my childhood, but an interesting story. My granddad had a small trucking company in the 40s (2 semi-trucks). Since no license was required back then, he put my dad to work driving the other truck when he was 13. Pretty sure middle schoolers aren’t allowed to drive tractor-trailers nowadays. 
in 90-94 my hs had about 8 each of full-on vending machines and about 12 Pepsi machines and 3 snack bars that could rival a bowling alley and they even had stuff that qualified for the free lunches and an extra one that sold KFC boxed meals
not to mention there was an actual cafeteria with normal school lunch food but maybe 40 people ate there … in fact the only kids that ate actual food(which was horrible its self)were the free lunch kids … the popular item was “pepper bellies” which was they’d take a bag of corn chips cut it open horizontally and added chilli cheese and rice over the chip …
For my birthday when I was 8. My dad was the civil defense director. We had a simulated train wreck with a car. 100’s of responders. I was hanging over the edge of the cliff in the car attached with a chain. They smashed the car window into my face. Carried me up the cliff into a helicopter. Real blood!
Honestly, that sounds like your father used a planned mass casualty drill to give you a thrill for your birthday.
Wouldn’t be allowed today. All my childhood friends participated.
My California High School in the early to mid 90’s had four different lunch lines, you had the “normal” lunchline with the standard nutritional slop the Department of Education mandated (this was the only line you could use if you had discounted/free lunch so it was always the most packed) But my school also had separate lines with foods for the exact same price as the normal lunchline, which I almost always used since the normal line was so packed. There was a “Nacho” line where they gave you a generic clear bag of nacho chips, some gooey orange cheese that definitely didn’t seem natural, and some freshly cut jalapenos. Then we had the “Pizza” line but unlike the normal line which on Fridays had the classic “french bread style” pizza with the square pepperonis everyone lives, the individual pizza line had actual triangle pizza but the pizza tasted, off. It was probably day-old since the cheese even when fresh seemed to have the consistency of something that had gone cold and was reheated as some point. I have no idea where my school would have gotten day-old pizza though.
From what I understand now at my old high school they got rid of the nacho and pizza line due to “nutritional concerns” so now everyone is just jam-packed in the main line now.
Man, my mom made us put together our own healthy lunches, and I used to get jealous of my friends eating school “pizza”. That description was cheap therapy… sorry for doubting you, mom!
When I went to Jewish day school, everyone had to eat the food prepared at school-- it was a kashrut thing. No outside food came onto campus, with few exceptions. If there was a birthday, you bought from a kosher bakery, or brought in candy that was hekshered. I’m not sure what food-allergic kids did. Maybe just skipped items they were allergic to. I do know that there was occasionally a kid from a vegetarian family who got a peanut butter sandwich instead of the meat entree. Every day.
When I went to public school, I had a lunch packed by my mother almost every day. Occasionally I ate the school lunch, but it had to have the appearance of being somewhat kosher-- I could eat chicken and noodles, but not pepperoni pizza, for example. Not that there are actually degrees of kosher-- non-kosher chicken is exactly as treyf as pork, but most mildly observant Jews are less squeamish about it. When I had the hot meal, my mother sent a container of juice for me to drink, and I was supposed to turn down the milk. Usually, I got it anyway, then tried to trade it for something.
Anyway, there were some parents (well, mothers, in strict point of fact, in the 1970s), who thought that kids needed a hot meal every day, so they made their kids get the school lunch every single day.
Those school lunches were really terrible, and I can’t imagine having to eat one every day. Most kids picked at them. Parents who thought they were better than a packed lunch must have had no idea how little kids actually ate of them. And no, it wasn’t just an excuse, because those kids were actually on the free lunch program. I went to a fairly affluent public school, and I’d been in the homes of several l of the kids who ate the school lunches-- they were bigger, and had more stuff than my family, and we were straight-up middle class.
Now, I suppose the “hot meal” was an excuse for not spending the time to pack a lunch, but the lunches my mother packed took a pretty minimal effort. Two slices of bread-- sometimes leftover challah on a Monday, but store-bought any other day, with a slice of cheese, or peanut butter between them, a piece of whole fruit-- apple, orange, banana, carrot sticks, or veggies leftover from the previous day’s dinner, and I bought milk at school. On Fridays, and minor holidays (I wasn’t in school on major holidays), I’d get a single cookie, or piece of candy.
In the time since, I’ve been a teacher, and now I know how much teachers notice and discuss among themselves what kids get for lunch. My lunches would have probably gotten a B- most of the time. On the other hand, some of the gourmet lunches I see kids with today, or the hyper-nutritious ones, you didn’t see in my time. But you saw fewer of the really awful ones as well. Seriously, I’ve seen kids come to school with a Snack-Pak pudding, a pack or Oreos, canned fruit, and those packaged orange cheese crackers. On a good day.
I wonder if teachers paid as much attention to what kids ate in my time, as they do now?
Thwre was a kid I went to school with, he could post here about the large pond on their farm, where he went swimming unsupervised. Just left ot his own.
or he could,if he hadn’t drowned one day, by himself.
I remember walking onto the surface of the frozen cow pond in the farmer’s field behind our house in Tennessee, pounding on the surface with a heavy walking stick (actually more of a handmade staff) ahead of me to judge the thickness of the ice…unsupervised, all by myself. I was 13 years old at the time.
That could have turned out badly…
I went swimming occasionally by myself in ponds on our property. I was supposed to let my mother know that I was out there, but she couldn’t really watch me, she’d be in the house.
I also rode a horse in the back pasture by myself – ditto, I’d tell my mother I was going to, but again she couldn’t see me from the house. Fell off once, but didn’t get hurt. I was 12 or 13.
Just something as simple as an unsupervised trip to the playground would never happen now; we did that all the time.
Our elementary school playground had a swingset, slide, jungle gym, and monkey bars - all anchored to an asphalt surface. Somebody once dared me to climb to the top of the swingset (I must have been about 9 or 10, and it wasn’t during school so no adults were around). I did, and then promptly fell off and whacked my head on the asphalt. Probably had a concussion, but in those days, as long as you could walk away, you weren’t “hurt.”
Something of a hijack, since we never, ever got pizza for lunch at school – or anywhere else actually, save Appian Way pizza out of a box.
The local drive-in theater offered among other things Bambino Pizza and during the intermission run a scratched up, faded promo for it showing a couple 25-year old “teenagers” chowing down on it in their convertible. Dad never bought any and, thinking back on it, that was probably wise.
My brother and I were pretty much permitted to go anywhere in our medium city past the age of eight, and did - by bus, bicycle and bootstraps. It’s not much more dangerous now than it was then
It might well be safer now. It’s perceived as more dangerous; but that’s not the same thing.
Perhaps when the parents went to school, they got school lunches like I had in 1968, (Glendale Arizona), and assumed it was still the same. This was a public school in tract housing, so not terribly upscale, but White. (I think that Arizona was very White at the time? Certainly Glendale was.) I don’t think we had a free school lunch program: I think that kids who were poor enough to not afford the lunch went to the bag lunch area – I guess same as people with dietary restrictions.
I think it was something like 50c then – which if I’ve got my ideas of the value of money right, was enough for a reasonable meal. We certainly all ate it, and enjoyed it. Seconds on deserts if you finished your meal. I particularly remember the Pineapple upside-down cake. And also, the stacked array of glasses, which we grade 4 students weren’t allowed to touch. I can only assume that the junior high used the same cafeteria? We drank our milk out of the cartons.
When I was in third grade, we moved to a different town in the middle of the school year. I had bought my lunch all through my school years until then, so my parents never thought anything of it to give me money for lunch. But the new school didn’t have a cafeteria. All of the kids brought lunch and are at their desks. Nobody had told me of this, so I sat there with no lunch. The teacher asked me, “Aren’t you going to go home for lunch?” So I walked home (about two miles), and started crying. The babysitter who was there to take care of my little sister called my mother at work and she told me to stay home for the rest of the day because I was so upset. The next day she gave me a note to explain why I hadn’t come back the previous day, and packed a lunch for me.
This was the same teacher who didn’t believe in nicknames. I was Richard the whole rest of the year.
We had one of those spinning “merry-go-rounds” that 20 or so kids could ride on. Yes, it was on asphalt. We got really good at picking pieces of gravel out of our palms. The weird thing is that there was a butt load of grassy area at the school. All the playground stuff was moved to the grass in the late seventies, I believe.